Three Open Problems in the Context of E2E Web Testing and a Vision: NEONATE

Web applications are critical assets of our society and thus assuring their quality is of undeniable importance. Despite the advances in software testing, the ever-increasing technological complexity of these applications makes it difficult to prevent errors. In this work, we provide a thorough description of the three open problems hindering web test automation: fragility problem, strong coupling and low cohesion problem, and incompleteness problem. We conjecture that a major breakthrough in test automation is needed, because the problems are closely correlated, and hence need to be attacked together rather than separately. To this aim, we describe NEONATE, a novel integrated testing environment specifically designed to empower the web tester. Our utmost purpose is to make the research community aware of the existence of the three problems and their correlation, so that more research effort can be directed in providing solutions and tools to advance the state of the art of web test automation.